Creatures of the Night: On Park Chan-wook and the Dardennes

FOCUS FEATURES
Kim Ok-vin as Tae-ju in Thirst

No other film this summer has made me so thrilled to be in a theater as Park Chan-wook's Thirst. I say this as a confession--because a morally aware adult with responsible tastes cannot excuse, let alone indulge, the feral pleasures set loose in this movie. At least I have company in my guilt. One of the film's two main protagonists feels as awful as I do about participating in the experience. The other has the time of her life, or undeath.

Recognized by scholarly viewers as a modern-dress Korean adaptation of Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin--whatever--Thirst is in fact many things: a tale of adultery and murder, a drama of Catholic spirituality, a thriller about medical science gone awry, a satire on provincial life (the hours clacked away in mah-jongg games, the years sighed out in claustrophobic shops and their upstairs apartments). But Thirst is always and above all a vampire movie, and as such it provides the best opportunity yet for the director of Oldboy and Lady Vengeance to express his lavish, grotesque and gleeful talent for bloodletting.

The star of this delirium is Song Kang-ho, who was so delightfully loose-jointed when playing the bleached-blond hero-despite-himself of Bong Joon-ho's The Host but here moves initially with heavy care, as if each gesture cost him pain from an inner wound. As Sang-hyun, a young hospital chaplain, he suffers from the death all around him, from the apparent futility of his efforts to aid the dying and from a spirit of renunciation that is perhaps too complete. Aspiring to martyrdom--or is it suicide?--Sang-hyun volunteers to be a research patient in an African clinic, where doctors are seeking a cure for a deadly virus that (strangely enough) infects only missionaries. He awaits the agony in his cell, playing Bach's "Ich habe genug" on the recorder; breaks out in pustules; hemorrhages profusely; and then dies on the operating table while receiving a blood transfusion--only to revive.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.